Been hoping to hope for you
Missed missing you
Cast sidelong glances at sidelong glances
The mirror dance we stumbled through as though blind
Was a sketch of an idea of an attempt at a prelude
But the second act is much better than the first
Friend, will I catch your eye across a crowded, hushed room,
See it shine with laughter, like radio on our private channel?
Who else has this frequency? Join in! All together, now
In this love of love
Joy that has no beginning
How could I imagine an end?
What is the leaf to the leaf?
What is the leaf to one chloroplast in one cell?
And what are you and I, God knows,
In this tree with roots so deep,
trunk so broad,
canopy so high,
that we all fit…
somewhere?
How can it be,
when the tree
is nothing to it,
nothing without it,
that the light loves it, too?
whose love comes before love.
Plunge me into shame, soul
of joy. Touch me,
Only to show how untouched I am. See me,
Only so I curl in on myself. Wrung
with loneliness I drip into the ocean. Fired
with despair, I am a speck of sand flowing into glass. You,
you cannot be so far that I won't reach for you. And I,
in the dark, don't even need to close my eyes to see your face.
a stork's beak tracing in air,
awaiting the feeling of fins underwater,
as still a gaze on the ground before prayer?
Or sighting and limning a lightness with ink,
and draping the blankness about as a veil,
eyes shining with secrets revealed,
and voice cradling verses inhaled?
How often the first voice is silent,
and in silence we raise up our own.
Is anyone speaking? Or do we just hear
what is and is all and alone?
John Darnielle [c. 1997]
You came down from heaven to the branch outside my window.
Your feathers were the color of snow.
The dice were loaded against us ever seeing each other,
but one of us had nowhere else to go
In your eyes were all the colors that the rainbow forgot.
Your wingspan was four foot wide or better.
With your voice practicing notes from time's own beginning,
you took apart the alphabet, letter by letter
And here, where it all stops for good,
where the cool waters run,
thought I saw a mouse kicking in your beak,
it was only a skeleton
I found this poem "I" wrote. Old photos are easy enough to look at now — the "boy" in them is always someone else, not me. In the secret place where I used to hold bottomless grief and hate for "him," now there is sorrow and compassion, because I know how ashamed and cut off "he" is. Each old poem, though, comes with imprints and echoes of "his" desperation to escape "himself." The best of them hold a little gleam of the light that kept "him" sane for the decades spent in that dark little hollow.
I didn't always write them well. Fair enough. I've already removed most of the pieces I didn't think had any merit at all, but I gave this one a second look and read the line I'd quoted at the end (without attribution — "mysterious" as usual). I had to look it up. Tolkien? I never liked Tolkien, but it was a good line. I re-read the piece in light of it.
I don't know what the title and opening lines were supposed to mean. You'd have to ask the author, if you could find them. My guess is the imagery was meant to allude to crossing an event horizon and muse on some convolution of spacetime. That seems about right, and it certainly didn't work.
Rereading is the most important work we do as human beings. Through it we perpetuate and adapt — our DNA, our youth and histories, our community and laws. As time and progress move us forward we pivot to face that eternal centre, compasses seeking the pole as we're dragged along the azimuth.
I've given it a new title as it pivots to look in a different direction from a different place toward the same origin, and kept the lines I thought mattered.
was there in this a
seed hatching in the fruit?
And in the blank behind the season [ ] wasnthere.
Wondering your gravity...
or the equivalence of the distinct principles
that must be the same, but only in a
small enough space
and your form always escaping forever
into form
—
"And far away may find a land where both our hearts may rest."
I'm struggling to live with my limitations, and knowing when to adapt to them, and when to push. Honestly, it's been rare for me to feel any other way but a bit seasick from all that rocking, the past week being a great exception and relief.
I woke at about 8:15 this morning. The sun was already high, and I was tired, disregulated, and had those mental and physical aches and spins of exhaustion. I deal very badly with sleep deficits, even though I'm properly medicated. I've been much healthier since I began working fully remotely and could give myself some extra time to let my body decide when to wake up. But now I've missed the morning and am supposed to wait until past noon, I think, to try again for that balance and peace.
I'm unsure what to do.
"Presumptuous" is the word I've used several times, in a particular context, for the opposite of my timidity. Being unsure of the boundaries of what's acceptable, especially for someone like me, I've chosen many times to err on the side of caution and reserve. I don't want to do that. That is not me. At least, not quite so much for so many things, and not all of me.
The past week, and yesterday especially, felt like being carried a on river as it branched from its watershed down a new course. I'm floating on the same water as before, but it's calmer as though purposeful, and incredibly untroubled by the rocks, rapids, and vortices that seemed inherent to it just a little upstream. I am afraid, from being long accustomed to those hazards, to let my guard down, afraid this gentle part can't last, and that I'll mess it up. I'm really, really unsure.
I try to try my best. I will continue.
Keep your head above water, but let the stream carry you.
never felt exciting before,
in the many, many times I've changed direction.
Maybe when I was little, and
spun, and
spun, and
fell over giggling (one time I threw up!)
but this — is different, this is new,
and I am giggling.
I tried to do it right, and shook a little,
part from trepidation, and partly
like a speck of iron quivering in magnetic flux.
This way, this way, this way. So many lines of force,
gentle, continuous over vast distance, converging: there, here.
I shook, I was giddy, I was afraid, I was awash
in the strange sense of being headed
in the right direction.
Nothing could be simpler.
There was an old green trampled mat,
draped over the porch steps getting sun-beaten dry after rain.
I'd taken it. It would do.
And when I opened my eyes
facing it and my splayed hands, everything looked just
like new.
as easier to seal into,
in secret dark, a cellar barred
away, the wants I knew I knew
would always be, and tell myself
the better thing would be to will
them gone. But bowed, a burdened shelf
within me creaks beneath them still.
And days are long when measured
in regrets replete with years
of gifts I should have treasured,
turned to moldered souvenirs.
I know this lesson now, I say,
but still I take my time,
and lose in a despondent way
what left of it is mine.
My body says "I'm tired,"
"You tire me," retorts my spirit,
and hisses, "Damn you, cut me free."
I struggle not to hear it.
And maybe it's the weight of what
I shouldn't say that bids me seek
a rock to whisper to the things that
I had lacked the grace to speak
when there was time — I know there never
was a possibility
but also know that it were better
had I mourned, then, and honestly.
and the crater walls are high
the stones run fingers down my back
and press me up against the black
and I could swear I hear them cry
at night when I am smallest
I've begged you then to let me die
and sometimes feigned a sudden slack
as if this grief were just a bear.
I'd never thought of it as prayer
when being shaken limp with lack
I begged you'd let me die
I've not consulted zodiac
or wailed at empty air
but, bent beneath remorse, confessed
as though a judge were standing there
who doesn't speak but echoes back
and in the silence after, I
can see the crater filled with sky
at night when I am smallest
her scraggly crown abuzz in thought,
If spinning on my seedwings, I'd
not landed in this little pot,
but grown amidst your tangled roots
and known what things they say
and learnt the lilts of choral chems
and shared the songs, the dance, the day.
Would now it be presumptuous
(if only I could stand)
to pull myself from this thin mulch
and try to root in righter land?
"She does not know our languages,
what could she take, what could she give?
Her cankered boughs won't bear the sun.
We do not think that she will live."
They're right, I think, to rule it out,
abide what cannot be unmade.
But I would wane the sweetest season
nodding in your shade.
The first meagre minutes of the day
can’t tempt me from bed, but something from my fever years drives me
out and I am
in a low, peculiar vantage point,
the screen window above me
catches nettling light I squint through, looking
for the sick heat of other days
for a way out not through this gouged place
for roots not split shells, old names
or chastisement for a fool returning —
my gaze has drifted.
again I look slantwise up. from nowhere
an impossibly opal sunrise
circles the world in pearl ember,
look! I close my eyes and miss you
I haven’t written from this place for years, barely read.
that part of me doesn’t want to eat,
knows like old cats and toothless elephants
know, that sustenance is not the answer,
know to look
elsewhere, but not anywhere I can find
the wind
ruffles the sky,
listen
are you listening with me?
as water runs softly over my face, falls in tiny thuds
to the wind
tousling
the shifting sides and secret nooks
of that bright unlikely expanse…
a white tarp, of course, stretched over the neighbours’ roof
eyes pushing forty have grown no wiser
and lead me no better than before,
but what did they see for that moment?
somewhere beyond a membranous surface
I took for the sky